Vimal Solanki, Brand Head, UN:ORTHODOX

Goa is our experimental store. We wanted our brick-and-mortar operation from a smaller market to understand our consumers and possibilities of market penetration simply because ROI becomes a larger issue when a brand debuts from metro market. After gaining confidence now, we are ready to explore locations like Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore as well as tier-II locations like Baroda, Bhubaneswar, Ludhiana and even in the Northeast. Our plan is to reach a mark of 20-25 stores by 2020.

How did the brand start and what’s the brand mix as of today?

1.5 years back, our company bought 7 footwear facilities in Pondicherry and today, we manufacture for 2 dozens of international brands. UN:ORTHODOX is typically a multi-brand store for youth fashion lifestyle footwear and accessories segments. Our in-house brand UN:ORTHODOX dominates our merchandises while we have others like German brand Gabor, French brand TBS and Austrian kids footwear brand Richter. We plan to add more brands to our portfolio soon.

Your accessories business is a visibly growing segment amongst youth. Tell us more about it.

Accessories have gone far beyond just being a utilitarian segment and I think, today, bag is more of a fashion statement than even apparel. Accessories hold 20% of our merchandise mix today but the way it’s growing, I predict this to occupy 30-35% in a short span. We recently ran our end-of-season sale in store as well as popular e-commerce platform and it was surprising for us to see that accessories gave us almost 30-35% of overall business.